For a satire on America's modern day celebrity culture, The Bling Ring is hard to beat. And, like all tales that come from the US that sound too far-fetched and redolent with symbolism to be real, it is entirely true.

Between 2008 and 2009, a group of five teenagers, one boy and four girls, spent their weekends on the outskirts of Los Angeles doing typical modern-day, middle-class American teenager stuff: updating their Facebook pages, going to Pilates classes, reading celebrity gossip on the internet, taking photos of themselves on their iPhones. And then, when they were done with all that, they would get drunk, get high, and get in a car. But after that they did something different: they raided the houses of celebrities they'd spent the day reading about on the web.

The celebrities, perhaps feeling protected by their own fame, often left their keys under the doormat and rarely turned on their alarm systems. Many didn't notice they had even been robbed, because they had so much stuff. All in all, the kids managed to take over $3m-worth of celebrity paraphernalia before the LAPD finally cottoned on to them. But that was only the start of the weird bleeding between celebrities and wannabes in this saga.

Nancy Jo Sales, a writer for Vanity Fair who specialises in stories about youth and celebrities, wrote about what was dubbed the "Bling Ring" in 2010, and she was the perfect person to do so. Sales is the journalist who you can either blame or credit for bringing Paris Hilton to national and then international fame, when she wrote the first big story on the heiress in 2000. Hilton and the breed of celebrities who followed in her wake – grimly dubbed "celebutards" by the very bloggers who wrote obsessively about them – were the celebrities the Bling Ring were raiding. Not because they were class warriors who were giving these spoilt "heir heads" (another popular term) what they deserved – but because they wanted to be them. And if they couldn't be them, well, they'd wear their clothes, which, as many of their victims were famous primarily for being fashion plates, was essentially the same thing.

The Bling Ring is the extended version of Sales's original magazine story, which has since inspired a film of the same name directed by Sofia Coppola. Just as an article in celebrity-dazzled Vanity Fair – a magazine that recently hired the scintillating cultural commentator Pippa Middleton as a columnist – can occasionally startle you with its sharpness, this book is far more memorable and insightful than one might initially assume. Sales takes care to locate the fame-obsessed burglars within the context of the time, if occasionally to a somewhat tenuous degree. She is excellent on the rise of the Bling Ring's victims, such as Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and model Miranda Kerr, and the role they played in the Bling Ring itself. I was less persuaded by her contention that the "meanness and aggression" that dominated American politics in the first decade of this century contributed to the narcissism and self-destructiveness of the celebrities and the Bling Ring. But it is hard not to be charmed by her paralleling of the rise and fall of Hilton and George W Bush.

During the Bush presidency, there was what Sales describes as a "new, mean style of celebrity reporting" and the kind of women who attracted the most attention were "young, 'hot', female and fairly troubled". They became famous through the most spurious of means, such as leaked sex tapes and reality TV. Some celebrities had talent, but their fame came from their bad behaviour, and the line between fame and infamy became irrelevant as long as they looked good in their mug shots. Hilton, Lohan, Nicole Richie and Britney Spears were the group's figureheads, followed by today's diluted versions, the Kardashian sisters, who are famous thanks to the triple play of a sex tape, a reality TV show and a father who defended OJ Simpson.

To join this new breed of celebrity, you couldn't just be wealthy and beautiful – you had to be aggressively unpleasant. I'm sure, say, Jack Nicholson wasn't a saint in his time, but he never starred in a reality TV show in which he humiliated working‑class people, as Hilton and Richie did for four years in The Simple Life. Snarky yet obsessive coverage of celebrity culture on websites such as tmz.com and Gawker, and in magazines such as Us Weekly, helped to make being a celebrity seem both more desirable and yet more accessible than ever before. Tellingly, the Bling Ring knew which celebrities were out of town by looking up their movements on tmz.com.

The difference between the A (ish) list and the aspirants is now almost indistinguishable, especially in LA. While the case was going on, one member of the Bling Ring, Alexis Meiers, was filming her own reality TV show and Sales, to her great embarrassment, was allowed to interview her only in front of the cameras. Detective Brett Goodkin, who worked on the case, proved unable to resist fame himself, and he appears in Coppola's film. He might now lose his job.

Then there's Coppola, a filmmaker who has been fascinated by fame throughout her career, sometimes to interesting effect (The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation), sometimes less successfully (Marie Antoinette, Somewhere). She has proven her clout as a director, independent of her father, but was once, like Hilton, famous only because of her surname. It's a name that remains irresistible to Sales's publishers, for they have splashed it across the cover of the book. We're all vultures feasting on the carcass of celebrity.